A Good Start

All the English teachers know it. They tell their students over and over again. You've got to have a hook at the beginning of a story to keep your readers reading. This is something I've lately been appreciating about Dickens as I'm reading his Christmas Books. He's really got it down. Here are some examples:

The opening lines of A Christmas Carol:

"Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change for anything he chose to put his hand to.
Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail."

C'mon! That's a good beginning!

And then there are the opening lines of The Cricket on the Hearth:

"The kettle began it! Don't tell me what Mrs. Peerybingle said. I know better. Mrs. Peerybingle may leave it on record to the end of time that she couldn't say which of them began it; but I say the kettle did. I ought to know, I hope! The kettle began it, full five minutes by the little waxy-faced Dutch clock in the corner, before the Cricket uttered a chirp....Contradict me and I'll say ten."

Don't you just want to read that story?

One more. I just began the last Christmas Book, The Haunted Man, this morning. The opening lines:

"Everybody said so.
Far be it from me to assert that what everybody says must be true. Everybody is, often, as likely to be wrong as right. In the general experience, everybody has been wrong so often, and it has taken in most instances such a weary while to find out how wrong, that the authority is proved to be fallible. Everybody may sometimes be right; 'but that's no rule,' as the ghost of Giles Scroggins says in the balled.
The word, Ghost, recalls me.
Everybody said he looked like a haunted man. The extent of my present claim for everybody is, that they were so far right. He did."

Ok. Don't you just want to read that story? Me too. I think I'll do that right now. Good-bye.